Reactant gas transport and cell performance of proton exchange membrane fuel cells with tapered flow field design

Effect of the prominent catalyst layer surface on reactant gas transport and cell performance at the cathodic side of a PEMFC

“…5 also discloses that the better cell performance is noted for the fuel channel with a prominent catalyst layer at constant over-potential. The above phenomenon was also described in a previous study [16]. The reason for the phenomenon is that the fuel gas is accelerated to passes through the gas diffusion layer (GDL), and the contact area of the fuel gas is enlarged, which enhances the chemical reaction on the catalyst surface.…”

“…where the tortuosity (s) of 1.5 was employed in previous studies [13][14][15][16][17]21] for the investigation of reactant gas transport in the mainstream flow channel of a PEMFC.…”

“…The purpose of this paper is to quantify numerically how the prominent catalyst layer surface influences the cell performance enhancement by changing the catalyst layer surface geometry. According to the results of the references [15,16], the liquid water effect does not change the trend of fuel cell performance enhanced by the internal flow modification. In addition, from the references' discussion, how the temperature varies the fuel cell performance enhancement is slight using the internal flow modification.…”

Non-isothermal transport phenomenon and cell performance of a cathodic PEM fuel cell with a baffle plate in a tapered channel

“…According to the results in the Refs. [18,21], the effect of liquid water is only significant at low voltage conditions and the liquid water effect does not change the trend of fuel cell performance enhanced by the internal flow modification. Therefore, the two-phase effect is neglected in the model to investigate how baffle plate and tapered flow channel influences the cell performance enhancement of a PEMFC.…”

“…The present study therefore employs the tapered design of the flow channel to reduce the reflection effectively for enhancing the local cell performance. In addition, many studies [13,[16][17][18][19][20][21] in last 5 years used two-dimensional model to simulate the gas transport and investigate the cell performance in the PEMFC, for saving the computational mesh and CPU time with the reasonable prediction.…”